The Principal Cause of Serial Monogamy

Yuji Agematsu, Lynda Benglis, Carly Burnell, Justin Chance, Violet Dennison, David Flaugher, Lauren Anaïs Hussey, Nika Kutateladze, Liza Lacroix, Sabine Moritz, Michael Simpson

Tara Downs is pleased to present The Principal Cause of Serial Monogamy, a group exhibition curated by Cooper Brovenick. Bringing together a cross-generational selection of artists, the exhibition examines the mechanics of temporality in contemporary life, elucidating the manifold correspondences among time, relationships, and artistic production. It also broadly considers the many afterlives of abstraction, posited here not in opposition to representational or figurative modes of painting, but rather as a countervailing, coexistent force. Many of the works on view deconstruct or otherwise disregard the oft-evoked binary between abstraction and representation, revealing ways in which abstraction, too, holds the potential to suggest narrative or temporal structures, or how materially-engaged, process-based practices may begin to render forms more closely associated with painting before the advent of modernism. Alternatively, other works recognize visual abstraction as a means of signification: as an allegorical assertion of desire, formlessness, and individual expression against forms of constraint, whether engendered by formal conventions of the medium or by the commitments, limitations, and compromises born from interpersonal relationships. Drawing upon a body of Surrealist literature, including André Breton’s L’Amour Fou, 1937, The Principal Cause of Serial Monogamy conceives of abstraction, like love, as a special sort of paradox: both mystery and revelation, a problem with which to contend and its own solution.